with the Knight of Glin, Ireland Observed: A Handbook to the Buildings and Antiquities (Cork: Mercier 1970), 118pp., ill., maps;

Intro. to Robert Pool & John Cash, Views of the Most Remarkable Public Buildings, Monuments and Other Edifices in the City of Dublin [rep. of 1st edn.] (Shannon: IUP 1970), ix, (1), xiv, 118pp., ill. [31 pls., map].

CommentaryPatricia Hutchins, James Joyces World (1957), p.3: When I visited William Magee [John Eglinton] at his home in Bournemouth, he had already contributed to the collection [of Joyces letters] but told me how Joyce had remarked that each city had a characteristic ballad and asked for information about the lines, The Lord in his mercy be kind to Belfast / Which sheltered the exile / When through it he passed. [and see ftn.: perhaps a reference to Wolfe Tone on his way to America.] Note that Craig wrote a poem that employs the first line as a refrain and which has subsequently been taken for the original.

Robert Greacen, review of The Elephant and the Polish Question (Books Ireland, Feb 1991), notes that James Joyce asked Craig to find for him the text of a poem containing the lines May God in his mercy be Kind to Belfast. He did trace the poem but considered the borrowed line [see Ballad to a Traditional Refrain] was the only good one. Craig tells us that his Ballad containing the borrowed line has been sung in pubs as folk-poetry, reprinted countless times, and even quoted in the House of Commons. Jeffares, whose native Belfast is ironically apostrophised in A Ballad to a Traditional Refrain. (Anglo-Irish Literature, p. 294). [Note Patricia Hutchins, supra, was married to Robert Greacen.] (Books Ireland, Feb. 1991, p.7.)

John Hume, article in Foreign Affairs (Winter 1979/80), makes use of the verse:To Hell with the future and long live the past / May God in His mercy look down on Belfast. (Quoted in rep. in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed. Seamus Deane, Derry 1991), Vol. 3, pp.779-86; see also note, glossing the verses as a variant on Maurice Craigs Ballad to a Traditional Refrain, produced here correctly: Its to hell with the future and long live the past, / May God in His mercy be kind to Belfast.

Rory Brennan, review of Classic Irish Houses of the Middle Size, and Dublin 1660-1860 [2006 reps.], in Books Ireland (April 2007), cites Craigs scathing dismissal of unionism, where he refers to that faction as contribjuting to the ruin of their country under the guise of protecting it. Again when discussing eighteenth-century Dublin and the exclusion of Catholics from power and prestige he remarks that an almost similar situation prevails in late nineteen-forties Belfast. These darts are all the more lethal for being flung with nonchalence. (p.79.)

QuotationsThe Elephant and the Polish Question (Lilliput 1990): [...] Proselytism is a dirty word in Ireland. The reason is that the conversion of someone from his original religion to another religion, at a time when he was, to say the least of it, at a disadvantage, is seen as the taking away of something, and not as the giving of something. / [164]
There is no doubt whatever that those who, during the nineteenth century, strove by fair means or foul to turn people away from the errors of popery, believed sincerely that they sought to give something of much greater value than what they sought to take away. To this day, the theoretical position of Irish Protestantism, especially in the North-East, is that if our fellow-countrymen could be converted to Protestantism all would be well, or at any rate much improved. It was to this end that the elaborate structure of the Church of Ireland, with, as an ideal, a parish church in every parish, and a complete organization, right up to the top where there were twice as many archbishops as in England, was set up and maintained. Even in the North-East, whenever and wherever individuals, whatever their origins, have embraced Protestantism, they are unaffectedly received and welcomed. The Protestants can continue to wish sincerely for the wholesale conversion of the Catholics only because they know that it is not going to happen. They would sincerely like to give each one of their benighted countrymen the greatest gift in their possession, provided they could be sure that they would not all accept at once. /
If that were to happen they would no longer be a separate and identifiable power-group, and their occupation would be gone. For 250 years or so the de jure position in Ireland as a whole was that unless you were a Protestant you could not expect to get a significant share of the money and the power. In the Six Counties this is still, de facto, the case, which is why the Protestants are so reluctant to yield any ground whatever to the Catholics as a group, whatever about individuals. /
Resurgent Islam is faced with a somewhat similar problem. Much of its message must consist in denunciation of the practices of the modern world, yet many of these practices must presumably be built into the structure of modern industrial society, to defeat which Islam must in part at least come to resemble. In theory, at least, Islam intends to take over the whole world, like all other universal religions. In practice, at present, it seems to be torn between denunciation of the gravy train and trying to climb on to it. (pp.163-64.)

See also Machinery and Morals [chap. title; sect. 1]: [...] My life will hardly by itself engage a reader's attention, though my opinions may, particularly when they interact with experience. / A friend who has read the bulk of this work has complained that it is lacking in urbanity, a quality which he is good enoug to say he has found in my previous books. I think I can see why this is so. / Urbanity is the fruit of ease. When you are at ease with the subject-matter you can afford to be urbane. I have mastered it to the extent of thinking I know how it is or was and how I should present it in a coherent way. These subject has usually been a rather small one, at least by the standards of the [3] world at large. And, good or bad, my books have reflected, I hope not complacency, but at least some confidence that I had a package to deliver. / But now my attention as been turned to those discontinuities and contradictions, in myself and in the world at large, which have troubled me and which I want to explore and probe. [...] (pp.3-4.)

Yeatss books: Not very long after Yeatss death I saw in Greenes bookshop a copy of Coryats Crudities which had belonged to Yeats. It was the Glasgow edition of 1905. It was not expensive and I could have afforded it. But I do not much care for early twentieth-century press-books and I let it go. I now know that books from Yeatss library are so rare as to be virtually unfindable. (The Elephant and the Polish Question, Dublin [Lilliput Press 1990, pp.86-87; quoted in The Library of William Butler Yeats: Guide for Readers - online at National Library of Ireland [PDF] and in RICORSO [as attached].)

ReferencesDonagh MacDonagh, ed., Poems From Ireland, with an intro. preface by R. M. Smylie (Dublin: The Irish Times 1944); notes that he occupied the same room in college as Parnell and has just completed a large and as yet unpublished study of W. S. Landor.

University of Ulster Library holds Dublin 1660-1860 [1952]; the Morris Collection holds.The Architecture of Ireland from the earliest times to 1800 (1982).

NotesHouse of Commons: Dr. Craig donated the Journal of the Irish HOuse of Commons to Trinity College Library, viz., The journals of the House of Commons of ... Ireland, Published by order of the ... House (Dublin: Abraham Bradley, stationer to the King ..., and printer to the ... House of Commons, at the Kings Arms and Two Bibles), 22 vols., ill. [pls., tables (some fold.), fol. [21.8-28.8cm] (TCD Library Cat.).